Sunday, October 25, 2015

Being a member of the older generation I can see that
the hookup culture can lead to what New York Magazine calls “sketchy sexual
situations.”

Traditional courtship was obviously designed to prevent such
sketchy sexual situations. It was designed to empower and to protect women.
Now, with courtship having been eliminated in favor of hooking up, young people
are beginning to see that the new culture can easily produce misunderstandings
that can lead to assaults.

It’s not so much a question of what percentage of college
students have hooked up or will hook up. What matters courtship has fallen out of favor, to the point where young people’s lives are
sexualized far more than they were, say, a half century ago. College students
may not hook up very often, but they seem to have dispensed with dating also.

Two college students, away from home for the first time,
possessing slightly underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, drunk out of their
minds, are very likely to engage in risky situations where intentions are
difficult to read. And, some of them are not even clear to themselves about their intentions or wishes.

In order to try to control the fallout from the hookup culture
colleges are now awash in affirmative consent laws. Of course, we are all in
favor of affirmative consent, but how can you know or tell. New York Magazine
has a list of what college students have taken to be affirmative consent. Link here. They range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Since the young generation has overthrown custom, it seems
resigned to seeing these issues adjudicated in a courtroom in a criminal trial.
You might think that the police are women’s best friends in such situations,
but it turns out that the threat of incarceration is far less potent as a
deterrent than the threat of facing her angry brother.

Among those who are doing a serious disservice to young
women are those who tell them that they can do what they please and that when
anything bad happens, they are not at fault. Risky behavior comports risks. If
you are willing to assume responsibility for the risks, go ahead. When bad
things happen, the person who hurt you ought certainly to be prosecuted, but it
is unlikely that you will find that to be an ample consolation.

As my friend Susan Brownmiller, who has been a leading
anti-rape activist for decades, said:

They [young
women] have been tremendously influenced by the idea that "You can drink
as much as you want because you are the equal of a guy," and it is not
true. They don't accept the fact there are predators out there, and that all
women have to take special precautions. They think they can drink as much as
men, which is crazy because they can't drink
as much as men. I find the position "Don't blame us, we're survivors"
to be appalling.

Culture
may tell you, "You can drink as much as men," but you can't. People
think they can have it all ways. The slut marches bothered me, too, when they
said you can wear whatever you want. Well sure, but you look like a hooker.
They say, "That doesn't matter," but it matters to the man who wants
to rape. It's unrealistic. I don't know what happened to the understanding
people had in the 1970s.

Brownmiller points out that sexual assault is a more significant problem outside
of campuses, but our imaginations are drawn more naturally to the problems of
the elites, of those who attend elite educational institutions.

One should assess the fact that beyond a new set of parietal
rules, one of the best antidotes to the misunderstandings that turn into
assaults is: sex with someone you know. I would say that it is best to have sex
with someone you love, but that would mark me as a hopeless anachronism.

Part of the problem in anonymous encounters is the increased
possibility for misunderstandings. The better you know a person the better you
can read his or her signals. The better you know a person the less you have to
say out loud. The better you know a person the more you will be inclined to behave
properly and respectfully.

Moreover, if you do not know the person who is lying next to
you, drunk and naked at 4:00 a.m. you will be more likely to treat her (or him)
disrespectfully. You will not expect to have to see him or her, no less to live
your life with him or her the next day.

This means that young people will reduce the risk of
misinterpreting signals if they get to know each other. It requires something
that is very much akin to a relationship.

Unfortunately, too many young women in college do not want
relationships. They have learned that relationships are an encumbrance, an
obstacle to their career advancement. When Princeton parent Susan Patton
suggested that college girls devote their dating experience to the task of
finding husbands feminists freaked out. They believed that Patton was trying to
turn these young women into domestic slaves.

So, we read a student’s impassioned assertion that
regardless of what she did, she did not consent to have sex. New York Magazine
reports:

To
older generations, the suggestion that hookup culture could be leading to
sketchy sexual situations makes complete sense. But in certain circles on
campus today, this link is extremely controversial. To suggest that women may
put themselves at risk by hooking up — by getting blackout drunk, by getting
into bed with someone they do not know — is considered to be an offensive
example of victim-blaming. In a recent essay in the Harvard Crimson called “Here’s
How I Was Raped,” student Viviana Maymi articulates this point of view:
“Everyone has the right to get as drunk as they want to without the threat of
being raped … Victims did not ‘put themselves in that situation’ as a result of
having been drunk … When a drunk driver enters a car, he knows he is impaired,
which is why he is responsible for the death of the person he runs over. Likewise,
at a party, a perpetrator knows he is impaired, and should be held accountable
for the drunken assumptions he makes and acts on.”

I am not sure why she thinks that drunk drivers know they
are impaired. Many of them think they have everything completely under control. We do know that people who are blind drunk lose impulse control
and lose the ability to exercise judgment. Again, I would also point out that
the only way young people seem to have left to regulate their dating behavior
is the long arm of the law. Perhaps the defense will work in the courtroom.
Perhaps it will not. The question is: why take the risk?

The article continues by saying that “hookup culture,”
meaning, young women, are “surprisingly idealistic,” meaning naïve and deluded. Note
the use of euphemisms. The author does not want to name the individuals who
might be responsible for their behavior and she does not want to tax them with
anything less than the virtue of being idealistic.

One does not quite understand why these young women believe
that it is good to trust strangers, drunken strangers, at that. Whoever it was who told
them to trust strangers did them a serious disservice:

Despite
the risks, hookup culture has become surprisingly idealistic, based on a sense
of trust that you can take a fellow student home and nothing bad will happen.
“The very idea that one should be able to go out and drink and wear sexy
clothes and not be sexually assaulted is something that did not even cross the
minds of women that are older than me. They thought sexual assault was a
guarantee if women were behaving like this,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a
University of Michigan sociologist who studies sexuality. “This generation is
surprised they are not as safe as they thought they were, and as they think
they should be, and as they are entitled to be. What they are asking for and
expecting is where we need to go. But the fact they are surprised we haven’t
gotten there yet puts women in terrible risk.”

You build up trust for another person through a series of
transactions occurring over a period of time. To imagine that you can trust
someone you met a half-hour ago is absurd to the point of being delusional. The
less you know the person the less you will be able to read him or her. The younger
you are the less skilled you will be at reading people, in general, no matter
what:

But the
very nature of the hookup may make people less attuned to, or even interested
in, what’s going on with their partner. “I think hooking up and emotionless sex
is great,” says David, a senior who identifies as queer. “Love it, love
third-wave feminism, do what you want with your body. But hookup culture is
inherently bad because you’re hooking up with people you don’t care about, so
you’re not concerned about their safety. I don’t think you’re as worried about this
random person feeling weird about it the next day, because you don’t know who
they are.”

Note the last phrase: “you don’t know who they are.” If you
don’t know who they are, how can you know what they do or do not want? And how can you feel responsible toward someone when you don't know who they are. And, if
you don’t know who they are, how can you know who you are, what you want and
what you should do.

As I said, one way to strike a blow against the rape culture
is to have sex with someone you know.

3 comments:

You'd think all the statistics would wake up young women? And as well it seems necessary to me to ungroup violently forced sexual intercourse versus alcohol-encouraged sex versus next-day-regret sex, and see a spectrum of bad situations even that are not rape at all, but just dealing with reputations through ugly rumors and peer pressure situations.

This says only 4% are "strangers", but I assume "someone you know" in this blog excludes "someone you just met 1 hour ago at a party and found a dark room". I guess hookups fits as the 19% "Acquaintance"?!http://thehathorlegacy.com/rape-statistics/Someone with whom the respondent was in love: 46%– Someone that the respondent knew well: 22%– Acquaintance: 19%– Spouse: 9%– Stranger: 4%

And here's the naivity part I guess, underage. Under age 12?!?!?!– Rape is considered a “crime of youth,” where fifty to sixty-three percent of reported rapes were of women under age 18, while sixteen to twenty-nine percent were under age 12.– Females ages 16-24 have the highest likelihood of rape – two to three times higher.

So it sounds like parental attention must help. I know one dad who offered to pay 100% of his straight-A student daughter's public college costs if she stayed sexually inactive and drug and alcohol free through college graduation, and she agreed. I never heard how that ended up.

Anyway, I'm still willing to put a high blame on alcohol, on the lowered inhibitions side. Teaching your kids about delaying sex doesn't help if they indulge in getting drunk.

I admit I don't know how good of a parent I would have been, since I skipped over the entire college party scene. Or at least I discovered you could have interesting conversations with people at a party after midnight, but I never drank anything, and never felt an impulse to. One friend asked me why on a camping trip and I said "My parents didn't drink" and that satisfied him.

Besides avoiding alcohol, I'd imagine its good for a parent to teach his daughters assertiveness skills, how to say no, how to retreat from uncomfortable circumstances, how to escalate resistance under different conditions. There must be some videos out there about avoiding peer pressure for all causes whether jumping off a bridge, to drugs to sex to shop-lifting.

It seems like parents have two different problems: (1) Being a hypocrite telling your kids not to do what you did (2) Being nerdier than your kids and not understanding peer pressure kids have now-a-days.

And I can see a child or young person's friends are critical, and so I wonder if or how a parent can help a child learn to evaluate their friends, and not join up with friends who act in ways your child agrees a person should not act. Getting things right with friends might make the difference with avoiding bad drug and sexual behavior later too. On the other hand, your child might play a good role model for her friends who are even more um "idealistic"?

I guess I'm glad I'm not a parent, and it easier to consider ideas than to be willing to do them if I was a parent. We're back to the "walk in someone else's shoes" thing I guess. Parents surely need their own positive "peer support" as well!

Along with the hopeless naiveté of these young women, there is the damage caused from the unwitting male's reaction to the dogma that "women are equal to men" and thus can drink like a man, have sex like a man, etc.

To the impressionable and (equally) naïve young male who buys this nonsense, the liberating thought is something like "These chicks are DTF! They're just like dudes! I don't have to worry about hurting her feelings the same way I don't worry about hurting my bro's feelings too much. It's all good!". Especially if she's throwing herself at him, or letting him make advance after advance with nary a roadblock, he's inclined to think everything is cool, and that her processing of and feelings about what's happening are roughly the same as his. (Since men an women are equal, right?).

So I can imagine his surprise and confusion when later on she accuses him of anything ranging from "taking advantage of" her, through "assault" all the way up to "rape". Especially if there was no physical coercion involved and she physically went along with everything. It must feel like a horrific betrayal.

I'm very glad I graduated from college in the mid-90's and don't have to deal with this BS. There was a hook-up culture back then, but it was mixed with a dating culture. Girls who had legit BF's were held in higher regard then one'' who got around, though no one was overtly judgmental about it. Dudes knew that if you wanted a quality girl you had to put some time in, and didn't really respect girls that gave it up to easily. Chicks could sense this. And chicks knew that getting stupid-drunk at frat parties, or out with random dudes was risky. It was just understood. And this was the early-mid 90s with the beginnings of take-back-the-night vigils and all that crap. There was still a basic understanding that men and women were wired differently, and that's just part of the way things were. To rail against it would be like railing against the changing of the seasons.

Nowadays, the fashionable rejection of reality has grown to cartoonish proportions. Young men can be forgiven for thinking, in the words of some comedian I can't recall at the moment: "Feminism has taught me that women aren't special."